Tag Archive: GNOME 3

The ‘Recent’ item under places in nautilus sidebar can be handy for accessing recent files on the system. However it can also be a privacy breach. There seems no easy setting to hide the ‘recent’ entry under places. Hiding the sidebar option will hide it completely. Here is a way to hide the ‘recent’ places under the file manager. Actually this does not hide the recent places, but does not allows any files to be listed there in the first place. After doing the following, you’ll see the ‘recent’ under places but there won’t be files listed in there.

The items shown under the recent are stored in a file which is dynamically modified as the user access the files over the system. Simply delete the file containing the recent items history using the following command.

$rm -rf ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel

Now you’ll need to logout & relogin for changes to take effect. However this is only a one time solution. You’ll need to manually run this command from time to time to clear the recent items.

If you want to save this hassle, you can do the following changes to clear the recent items from not showing up at all. A permanent fix would be to first delete the above file. Now immediately before you open any of your documents(audio, video, text or any file), open a terminal & do the following.

$cd ~/.local/share/

$touch recently-used.xbel

$su

#chattr +i recently-used.xbel

That’s it & you’re done. Now ‘recent’ items under the sidebar will always be empty. To know more about the chattr command, read this post.

Like this:

GNOME desktop has been completely revamped in its new avatar, the GNOME 3. All the changes till now have made it more usable than before. I’m quite liking the new desktop but there is one thing that annoys me big time. Where is the shutdown button? I couldn’t find it anywhere. Is there any keyboard shortcut or mouse gesture to shutdown the desktop? I quite literally, shutdown my computer from the virtual consoles by issuing an ‘init 0’ command for some instances till I figured out the shutdown button is indeed present but not visible(as it was in testing releases of GNOME 3).

To shutdown the computer when using GNOME 3, you need to click on your user-name in the far right top corner of your screen. Upon clicking you’ll get the regular drop-down menu, with the last option as ‘Suspend’. Now press the ‘Alt’ key on the keyboard & keep it pressed and voila the ‘Suspend’ option magically turns into ‘Power Off…’. Upon clicking, you’ll get to choose between a system restart & shutdown.

There you have it. I don’t know why the GNOME team decided to make it so mysterious. GNOME has always been a user-friendly desktop environment but such moves may make its users turn to other alternatives. Already some users have expressed their annoyance to the new changes of the GNOME 3.